The families of China’s pre-Communist elite remain privileged

THESE DAYS the Chinese Communist Party prefers to play down the horrors unleashed by Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. But a rare chronicle of the period by a writer based in China, “The World Turned Upside Down”, describes the chairman’s harsh campaign to reorder Chinese society in vivid detail. (An English version will be published in January; like the Chinese original, it will be banned in mainland China.) The title of Yang Jisheng’s book well conveys the experience of those who enjoyed privilege in the pre-Communist era, who were brutally persecuted under Mao.